This is a superb book—impeccably sourced, lucidly written, cogently argued. The author weaves a narrative that is compelling, insightful, and delivered with accessible prose, making the book arguably appealing to a broader audience across disciplines and specializations. The key figure in this monograph is Tanganyika’s (later Tanzania) independence president and the nation’s founding patriarch, Julius Nyerere, fondly known as Mwalimu, Swahili for “teacher.” The book situates Dar es Salaam as the site of three overlapping and interlocking themes germane to the 1960s–70s era.

First, pan-African struggles for liberation, particularly the fight against white racist minority regimes in southern Africa and the anti-colonial resistance directed at the last redoubt of European colonialism—Portuguese rule in Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, and Mozambique. Both sets of struggles took the tack of armed insurgency with substantial external support. The Organization of African Unity (OAU), founded in 1963, had as its most important objective the fight to rid the continent of the last vestiges of colonial occupation (by Portugal), white minority rule, and apartheid. The OAU Liberation Committee was established to coordinate and facilitate different liberation struggles, its headquarters in Dar es Salaam under the chair of Tanganyika’s Foreign Minister, Oscar Kambona.

In this book, George Roberts offers meticulous and fascinating analyses of the diplomatic and political activities of liberation movements that used Dar es Salaam as their major external base. The focus is especially on South Africa’s African National Congress and Mozambique’s Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), showing how inter/intra-movement fissures and factional fights played out in Dar es Salaam with important implications for Tanzania’s domestic politics and the intersection with Cold War imperatives. Taking the case study of FRELIMO—whose president, Eduardo Mondlane, was assassinated by a mailbomb at the movement’s Dar es Salaam headquarters in 1969—the book sheds light on the political contestations and contradictions of Africa’s liberation movements of the 1960s and how they mapped onto power struggles in a new postcolonial nation-state of young but radical political actors.

The second major theme of the book is Tanzania’s experimentation with “African Socialism” under the blueprint of the 1967 Arush Declaration and the 1971 Mwongozo or “Guidelines,” the latter seeking to rearticulate commitment to domestic revolution and dealing with externally sponsored counterrevolutionary forces conveniently defined as imperialism. Among the most important policies implemented after the Arush Declaration were economic nationalization and Ujaama—an ambitious villagization of society. Implementing the Arush Declaration was rife with contradictions and ideological contestations that reflected Cold War divides but also domestic factionalism: one ideological wing pressed for a radical revolutionary agenda along Marxism-Leninism while another pushed back and favored pragmatism and realism. Ultimately, on the economic front, the socialist experiment ended in spectacular failure, but the book says nothing about the far-reaching impact of Ujamaa and Nyerere’s philosophy on nation-building.

Not to take away the book’s rich, nuanced, and incisive narrative, the suggestion of “Revolutionary State-Making” in the title is not quite followed through in the text. A reader with keen interest in postcolonial African state-making/nation-building processes would have hoped to learn about how Nyerere’s African Socialism, especially the Ujamaa agenda, shaped Tanzania’s path to a deeply shared comradeship and a unique national identity unlike most African nations. Relatedly, an analysis of how Nyerere and the state-party reengineered the postcolonial state apparatus—administrative, bureaucratic, and coercive—would more aptly speak to the book’s catchy title. For example, there is only passing reference to the 1964 army mutiny and the rebuilding of a new army but no details on the processes and the making of a postcolonial defense force. The book discusses contestations between technocrats, leftist intellectuals, radical youth party activists over government policies, but it says nearly nothing about how the actions and inactions of different actors, including Nyerere’s, reshaped the Tanzanian state, one way or another whether in the Weberian sense or otherwise. Instead of state-making then, the book is really about “Dar es Salaam’s central position in the international politics of the [Cold War] era” (25), to which I turn next.

The book’s third theme is the Cold War politics, deeply interwoven with the first two themes sketched above. One of the book’s strengths is casting the empirical and theoretical aperture wide enough to rescue the Cold War from the narrow East–West binary it is conventionally tied to. Sino–Soviet turf wars and East–West Germany contests shaped the contours of the Cold War in Africa, and the book impressively excavates the drama that dotted this slice of great power competition. Cold War politics runs through all the book’s chapters, with Nyerere engaged in delicate balancing and skillful navigating of competing external interests as against an avowed commitment to nonalignment, pan-Africanist liberation struggles, and the pursuit of a socialist revolution.

Across seven chapters, an introduction, and conclusion covering the three themes, Nyerere is at the center of everything. Interestingly, however, the author concludes that the “book has argued that a fresh analysis of Tanzanian politics in the time of Ujamaa requires us to look beyond the figure of Julius Nyerere” (281). That said, positioning Dar es Salaam as a site of struggle, George Roberts makes a huge and timely contribution to a burgeoning literature that casts the spotlight on the early years of independent Africa, specifically the transnational circuits of struggle and the intellectual currents that fueled revolutionary change.